Richard Dawkins’ first work has thrilled fans and frustrated critics for five decades. The science has moved on, but any writer looking to supplant its place must learn its lessons

Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene was not predicted to be a success. Its initial print run, published this week in 1976, was just 5,000. It went on to sell millions, and is perhaps the most influential work of pop-science ever. For 50 years, it has been the go-to resource for the layperson seeking to understand evolution.

What accounts for its enduring power? Prof Dawkins’ central claim, that “we are survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes” was provocative, stripping the messy stuff of human and other life down to a simple law. And yet the book is primarily concerned with proving that complex, selfless behaviour such as altruism in animals can emerge from these basic “selfish” drives, satisfyingly resolving an apparent paradox. Prof Dawkins – a zoologist by training – also succeeded in conjuring entertaining, vividly drawn vignettes of the lives of animals, from lions and ants to hawks and honeybees, to make his points.

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© Photograph: Roger Askew/REX/Shutterstock

© Photograph: Roger Askew/REX/Shutterstock

© Photograph: Roger Askew/REX/Shutterstock

In the eight years since my graphic novel on death published, I’ve learned readers of all ages want to talk about loss and preserve their family’s stories

Becoming an author in my late 50s was unexpected, the result of my daughter Hallie’s own existential anxiety in her early 20s.

Fearing my untimely demise, she begged me to write down advice that would cover all of life’s bases going forward. I agreed, but put the project off for years; it wasn’t until she cornered me with a laptop on vacation that I gave in. She asked countless questions, and I found, to my surprise, that I had plenty to say. Hallie helped shape the manuscript, and then spent a year painting its warmly emotional gouache illustrations.

I lost a parent (or other loved one, including spouse or beloved pet) and your book helped me through.

I gave the book to my kids and wrote my own notes in the margins.

I can’t bear the thought of my mom or dad dying, but they don’t want to talk about it. I’m hoping that sharing the book with them will start some conversations.

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© Illustration: Hallie Bateman/The Guardian

© Illustration: Hallie Bateman/The Guardian

© Illustration: Hallie Bateman/The Guardian

Scraping copyrighted material from internet could ‘potentially’ amount to acquisition of property by government, Anne Twomey says

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Altering copyright law to allow AI companies to scrape music, books and journalism could trigger a constitutional breach, Coalition senators and the recording industry have warned, as they raise new fears it could open Australia to massive legal action and compensation claims from rights holders worldwide.

The attorney general’s department admitted it was “extremely alive” to the issue, and Australia’s leading constitutional expert, Anne Twomey, agreed there was “potentially” a concern – depending how legislation was drafted – that granting AI companies permission to scrape copyrighted material from the internet could amount to an acquisition of property by the government.

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© Photograph: Lukas Coch/AAP

© Photograph: Lukas Coch/AAP

© Photograph: Lukas Coch/AAP

Minihorror by Barbi Marković; Paradise Burns by Pol Guasch; Hafni Says by Helle Helle; Googling for Soul by Hamid Ismailov

Minihorror by Barbi Marković, translated by Jen Calleja (Faber, £14.99)
This eccentric and fantastical collection of very short stories is bursting with weird life. Mini and Miki (the Disney mouse names in Serbian) are a sometime boyfriend and girlfriend living in Austria. They visit Mini’s family, who gather round a pit and make her climb down into it (when she told Miki “they’re dragging me down”, he thought it was a metaphor). They visit Miki’s family, where a dog Mini draws on a card comes alive and attacks her. Things swing from hopeful – “they’re having fun like a couple in an advert” – to dismal: a hair dye goes wrong and “Mini looks like a 13-year-old dog”. Minihorror combines a Bernhardian comic gloom (“in summary, everything’s tainted, and existence is a particular hardship”) with antic energy. “Miki isn’t sure what to think about life. Is it good? Is it bad?” It’s everything, just like this book.

Paradise Burns by Pol Guasch, translated by Mara Faye Lethem (Peninsula, £12.99)
“Stories, if you give them an order, aren’t stories but lies.” Catalan author Guasch makes the point vividly in this novel which flits briskly from present to past and from narrator to narrator. It’s set in a changed climate – “One only knows it’s winter now by the shrunken days and long nights” – where young men join a firefighting service and fight “wildfire simulations of blazes that could not be put out”. The central characters are friends Rita and Líton, but Líton is dead when the book begins – “twenty-four short years, a life as fleeting as a shooting comet” – so the story goes backward, to find out why. The jumpy narrative ranges from Rita’s childhood diary, to three “crafty old biddies” in the neighbourhood, to Líton and his lover René. But inside the hectic structure is a tribute to the value of friendship, and how a friend “has to be the net beneath the tightrope that is life”.

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© Photograph: /Apollonia T. Bitzan

© Photograph: /Apollonia T. Bitzan

© Photograph: /Apollonia T. Bitzan

The British novelist on discovering Molly Keane, coming to Dickens late, and the books that taught her the importance of writing about history

My earliest reading memory
My mother always read me a bedtime story, but by around age three, I was not looking at the pictures but reading the text. After that, I read to myself, and would read four books a week from the library.

My favourite book growing up
As a child I read Elizabeth Goudge’s The Little White Horse, and the combination of history and gothic fantasy was very powerful for me. It’s realistic and charming and frightening without being nightmarish. It started my love of historical fiction, and has since become a family favourite for my own children.

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© Photograph: Chris Leah

© Photograph: Chris Leah

© Photograph: Chris Leah

She plays a depressed fisherwoman. He plays a man made of wicker who is solely dedicated to her pleasure. How did the actors feel about this strange, emotional connection – and what did Colman draw from her own marriage?

Another year, another raunchy comedy-drama in which Alexander Skarsgård is the answer to a social outcast’s erotic dreams. “I fucking loved Pillion so much!” says Olivia Colman, reliably sweary straight out of the gate, as she brings up last year’s British indie hit starring Skarsgård as a leather-clad dom with a timid traffic warden as his submissive. “And when they kissed at the end … Aww.” The 52-year-old Oscar-winner for The Favourite gives a mock-sniffle and a little shake of her frizzy grey locks, then pretends to dab her eyes.

Seated beside her in a London hotel room and wearing a bright orange “I’m With Stupid” T-shirt, Skarsgård tilts his head appreciatively. In Pillion, it was Harry Melling who had the privilege of being ravaged by the 50-year-old Swedish actor. Now it is Colman’s turn in Wicker, an earthy adult fairytale filmed in Budapest and set in a medieval village populated almost exclusively by British comic actors who converse in language both archaically formal (“Happy to transact with you”) and bluntly colloquial (“I’d better fuck off”). Among them is Phil Daniels as a leering butcher and Richard E Grant as a doctor who is even more inept at his job than Grant was as a Celebrity Traitor.

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© Photograph: Courtesy of Black Bear

© Photograph: Courtesy of Black Bear

© Photograph: Courtesy of Black Bear

Shortlisted for the Goldsmiths prize, this compelling interrogation of memory, justice and truth offers no easy answers

The Goldsmiths prize-shortlisted debut from British-Greek author Aea Varfis-van Warmelo opens with a confession: “I have never told this story before.” The narrator, who bears the author’s name, goes on to tell the reader that she is a liar. From Humbert Humbert’s self-justifying account of abuse in Lolita to the devastating misinterpretation at the heart of Ian McEwan’s Atonement, the trope of the unreliable narrator exposes the dangerous gap between the stories we tell and the truths they obscure. In Attention Seeking Behaviour, the reader is asked to examine their own capacity for trust.

A young woman aspires to be a writer – yet she has paused her postgraduate degree in poetry. She works unfulfilling jobs that demand little from her and has a lot of sex, which she describes as offering her “solitude”. She does all this while lying compulsively. She lies for fun, to flirt, to steal, for sympathy. She lies out of a desire to hurt others, but also to preserve her own privacy. Lying is, as the narrator claims, universal, though success at lying is not. She regards fraudsters and scammers with derision: they are “divorced from reality” and give her “second hand embarrassment”. In her eyes, her own lies are somehow purer.

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© Photograph: Naomi Joanne Delorme

© Photograph: Naomi Joanne Delorme

© Photograph: Naomi Joanne Delorme

Journalist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Maria Ressa chronicled her fight against the Duterte regime in the Philippines in her 2022 book, "How to Stand Up to a Dictator." She detailed attacks on her reporting and her newsroom's struggle to defend press freedom and democracy. In a new book, Ressa warns of other threats to those same freedoms. Amna Nawaz spoke with Ressa about "The Fight Back."